If you want to take part in important cultural conversations in the United States, this is the one movie to see this year. It’s also terrific entertainment. Here are three reasons why.

The English director Steve McQueen, who is black, had never before seen a movie about slavery in the United States that was told from the perspective of the slave — so he made one. His outsider-looking-in status allowed him to create work with a cold, hard message.

It’s a movie about brutality, but Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance as Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from New York and violently, relentlessly forced south into servitude, is a study in subtlety. For two hours, he portrays a once-proud husband and father slowly being ground down both physically and mentally.

It’s a movie you end up looking away from a great deal because there are horrific moments of bloodletting, rape and other kinds of violence. But you have to keep looking back because you see, unflinchingly, the human trafficking and subjugation upon which life in the United States was based for centuries.

About the blogger

Chris Roberts is an arts and culture reporter for MPR News. He has worked at Minnesota Public Radio as a reporter, producer and host since 1989. From 1999 to 2003, Roberts created and hosted MPR’s weekly arts program, “Word of Mouth,” hosted The Current’s “The Local Show,” a weekly hour long program devoted to local music.